


The Rainbow Connection

by melannen



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Disability, Gen, Quotations, Songfic, colorblindess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-01-13
Updated: 2004-01-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 03:33:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/pseuds/melannen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Proposition: The colors red, blue, and green are real. The color yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody-- Demolish.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rainbow Connection

**Author's Note:**

> Dear stellar_dust:
> 
> It is your fault this got written, so you get to tell me what the heck I'm supposed to do with it. Also you can tell me what I was trying to do with the random tense shifts, what is up with the bizarre artsy structure, where the plot ran off to, why I am suddenly quoting "Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead", and why my personal x-files soundtrack seems to be John Denver and the Muppets.
> 
> You're welcome.
> 
> Loves,  
> melannen

_Why are there so many songs about rainbows and what's on the other side?  
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions, and rainbows have nothing to hide:  
So we've been told and some choose to believe it, but I know they're wrong, wait and see.  
Someday we'll find it, the Rainbow Connection, the lovers, the dreamers and me._

 

Red.

He hears the whispers, of course. "Spooky" Mulder. He's just a little . . . off. Not quite right in the head. Sees the world slightly but critically differently from the way everyone else does. Doesn't perceive things the way normal people do.

They are, of course, literally correct.

Scully's hair, in the dim basement office, is the rich, warm golden color of a sunbeam. In the cathedral light of an old-growth forest-- it seems they've ended up there, running from yet another eldritch horror, on at least half their cases-- her hair takes on an entirely different color, the color of growth and life, blending into the layered, backlit depths of the foliage. "Red" does not even approach describing it.

Scully's blood, when it ran down her face in the nosebleeds she kept desperately trying to pretend were not killing her, was horribly, vibrantly bright, the same vivid color as the caustic bubbling stuff that splattered from the shapeshifting aliens when they were wounded. It had shocked him the first time he saw that, shocked him to see that they were maybe not so alien as he had thought, that they bled the same color as everyone else. It was not until he'd read Scully's report that he realized the truth.

The Truth. Little _gray_ men, not little _green_ men, he always corrects them. He is very bad at working with Greens.

Green, the color of flame, the color of fire.

Fox Mulder was a literal-minded child. It was as much self-defense as anything, in a household as full of traps and silences as the one his parents had built for themselves, where an unlucky guess or innocent speculation could take you too close to a secret and light up a firestorm. He learned to consider things at face value, not question what he was told. Trying to negotiate just what was on the surface was dangerous enough without making life even more difficult for himself. His parents, proud of his obvious intelligence and his down-to-earth stolidity, but occupied with their own intricate problems, taught him self-sufficiency early. School should have been a triumph.

Yellow.

That was the first time everything inverted itself, when the teacher yelled at him the first day of first grade for putting his bag on the wrong shelf as if he hadn't even tried to look at the color-coded labels, as he got in the wrong lines and used the wrong kickballs, couldn't do the worksheets properly, couldn't do _anything_ right, and couldn't understand why. It was as if his reality was shifted several degrees from everyone else's. The more frustrated and defeated he got, the more silent and isolated he became, turning his intensity and determination against an enemy as unyielding of itself as it was of solution. That November, at his first parent/teacher conference, long-suffering Miss Webster told his mother that she didn't understand it: He was a smart kid, quiet, but he simply would not follow instructions, he would not do what he was told. He always, she said, had to do things his own way. She gave his mother one of his crayon drawings of pale blue people standing below trees with brown leaves and green trunks, which he had volubly insisted was _not_ imaginary. That night around the dinner table, his little sister Samantha, as precocious as he was, giggled and said it looked like _aliens_. His parents exchanged one of those glances, full of fear and worry and anger and something else, which he had learned very early meant be quiet and go to bed.

The drawing disappeared. The subject was never brought up again at home. At school, he learned never to go first, never to stick his head out or volunteer, to carefully watch what the other kids were doing and follow their lead, and he stopped being noticed in class. Then, in second grade, the school nurse called him up for some routine medical tests.

"Routine" they said then, anyway. Now, when every mention of government testing sends a prickle of suspicion down his spine, when he remembers a vault in West Virginia full of smallpox vaccination records, when he's learned some of the secrets behind his parents' old silences, he wonders if it was in fact routine. He certainly doesn't remember any of the other second graders having them, but then he is well aware of the fallibility of memory. And anyway, all of that was still beyond young Fox, already planning how he'd wow his little sister that night with tales of his great adventure in the nurse's office.

Then he completely flunked the Ishihara tests. Verdict: Profoundly red-green colorblind. Deuteranopia. His parents were called to the school again for a meeting with the nurse, and she explained it patiently to them, going into detail for his biologist father, using small words for him. She explained that it was actually fairly common, as many as one in ten men were colorblind to some extent, but since it was possible to live a completely normal life with a little extra care, you usually wouldn't even notice they were different. She showed them paired color wheels and photographs that looked exactly the same to him but seemed to have deep significance to his parents, and they looked at each other, half relieved, half afraid, independently working out the implications of their son's defect, his genetic imperfection.

School got much easier after that, once everyone knew. He was a nine days' wonder to his classmates, but far better, he quickly learned, to be a freak than a loser, and he even began tentative friendships for the first time in his life. The endless surprise color quizzes on the playground-- "Hey, Fox, is my shirt blue or purple?" "Put these crayons in order!" "What does this picture look like to you?"-- trained him efficiently in the tiny differences in shade and brightness that allowed him to make the fine distinctions, taught him to notice what other people didn't, to deduce what should have been obvious, to remember words and details so he could spit them back and pretend to be normal later, and eventually led to the discovery of his photographic memory.

Meanwhile, he went through a brief infatuation with learning the science behind his condition, reading everything about dichromacy in the school library and then plowing through what he could find in his father's medical books, a fascination which would eventually lead to Oxford and a degree in psychology. For now, though, he was busy exploring the ramifications of the newfound fallibility of his perceptions. Forget looking no farther than he could see. Forget true and false, black and white; even shades of gray were inadequate, when your gray could turn out to be everyone else's mauve. He had to learn not to trust the evidence of his own senses, to trust what other people told him instead. What he saw could not be depended on, so listen to other people, his parents, his sister, his teachers, authority figures: what they said was reality, what was real.

He became fascinated with illusion and deception, the ambiguity of truth in a world where red could be green and blue could be purple. Shadings of reality: How could you _know_? How could you ever, really, know for sure? Maybe yellow was really blue, too, only nobody had ever noticed. Suddenly, nothing was certain, and everything was possible. He started reading magazines about UFOs and the hollow earth and how the moon landing had been faked; he studied illusionists and stage magicians, and became so obsessed with the ongoing Nixon cover-up scandals in Washington that his sister sometimes got really annoyed with him. She used to lie to him sometimes about what colors things were. Board games particularly were a nightmare; he'd never once won at Candyland against her. He used to insist they play something like Stratego, where the only colors were red and blue, and anything else he could figure out by logic.

Well, he never had been able to tell the difference between _stop_ and _go_.

Green.

Not a lot of people knew about his handicap. It was not that he tried to hide it, but as the nurse had promised him, it just didn't come up that much in day-to-day life. It wasn't as if he introduced himself that way: "Hi, I'm Mulder, and I'm colorblind," any more than he announced to people that he was hopelessly in love with his partner and afraid to admit it; still, he was always surprised when people were surprised to find out. It was just a part of him, one of the constellation of emptinesses that made up Fox Mulder: My parents were divorced when I was twelve. I've never had a successful relationship in my life. I can't look my father in the eye. Large portions of my memory of my childhood are missing. Everyone I care about is destroyed by my obsessions. I only see in two colors. My sister was abducted by aliens when she was eight and I was supposed to be taking care of her.

He'd half expected that his disability would disqualify him from the FBI, but instead he'd graduated first in his class from the Academy and begun a stellar career as a profiler, before he'd ended up on a fast track to nowhere in a tiny basement office for reasons that had nothing to do with _color_-blindness. In fact, it had saved his and Scully's lives at least twice that he knew of. Once, it had rendered him immune to subliminal messages inserted into television signals, while Scully became paranoid and homicidal. Once, sitting in a hospital room across from Modell, a gun to his head, he had turned to see Scully standing in the doorway, her hair and lips _red_, so red, an epiphany and revelation of color: Pusher's illusions bypassing his incomplete retinas and placing the picture directly in his mind. Other times, too, when a flash of something beyond the spectrum he knows offered him the vital hint that what he thought he was seeing was all in his mind. He had learned early on that anything too technicolor hyperreal had to be fake.

There were certain questions people always asked, as boring and predictable as the comments about little green men. How do you deal with traffic lights? Does everything look like a black-and-white movie? Do you dream in full color? --Sometimes, he says, remembering a bright red spot that had led him into a forest and traced out a heart on a little girl's nightgown, but usually he tries to avoid his dreams; they are all memory anyway. After the affair with Augustus Cole, when his disability had been enough to remind him, once again, that he could never trust what was before his eyes, he'd told his new partner about his colorblindness, feeling the missing place where Scully belonged and needing someone, anyone to reach out to. Krycek had not made any of the awkward, cliche comments; he'd just grinned and said "That explains the ties, then."

Blue.

Mulder had never told Scully; given the number of times she'd ended up poring over his medical records, she had to know, but she'd never said anything. There were a lot of things she had to know but was kind enough to leave unacknowledged. For now. His only other good friends, the Lone Gunmen, had taken it in stride, as they took everything in stride, from breaking into secret DoD databases to analyzing alien viruses. Of course, they were all a bit off, too. Langly literally lived to the beat of a different drummer (Moe Tucker, he'd been known to claim anachronistically), his tinnitus the relic of too many loud concerts in his wild youth; Byers was mildly dyslexic, and Frohike was legally blind without his contacts. Sometimes he wonders if that is a prerequisite: to get the truth, give up something else.

He thinks about Odin and Horus, one-eyed and all-wise; the old Fisher King, crippled by having an answer nobody will ask the question for. Mad geniuses and deaf musicians and Steven Hawking. All the poor peasants in folktales who use the fairy ointment and lose an eye for it. The old Jungian archetype of the blind Seer, says the psychologist: Phineas, and Tiresias the Prophet, and Oedipus who gouged his own eyes out when he learned the truth about his mother.

The Cigarette Smoking Man, of course, has sacrificed his senses of smell and of taste in order to be one of the ones who knows. And Mulder's father had died for knowing. So many people had died.

He is perfectly well aware of his tendency to build an elaborate framework of belief on one fact and a great deal of pretty story, all tied up in ribbons and bows.

Scully's eyes are blue, the one color he sees the same way everyone else does. Well, for all he can tell they're green, like Krycek's had been, or purple, but her ID says they're blue. Sky blue, sea blue. Which white whale are you looking for, Captain?

Once, the sky had been his ally because of that honesty. White, blue, black: In the sky, what he saw was what he got. He'd spent hours happily stargazing, until the night when the stars became the enemy and he started to learn that maybe his own eyes couldn't be trusted, but then neither could anything else.

It was the classic revelation of the paradox of the senses: How do you know that what you call "green" isn't the same as the color everybody else thinks is red? How could you tell?

Proposition: "The colors red, blue, and green are real. The color yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody-- Demolish."

At some point, everyone comes across it, perhaps a sentence in an old book, a private revelation in the dark of night, a philosophical proposal put forward by a thoughtful teacher. The beginner's solipsism: the color quandary. Ask a question and spend a day or a week seeing the world in a new light, learning to trust and then not to trust the evidence of your senses, and come back with a new understanding of the world.

One of the standard colorblindness tests looks like a 2 to colorblind people, but a 5 to everyone else, although if you know what you're looking for and squint a little bit you can make out the ghost of the other.

That is Fox Mulder's life.

He's sorry it wasn't a unicorn. It would have been nice to have unicorns.

 

_Who said that every wish would be heard and answered when wished on the Morning Star?  
Somebody thought of that, and someone believed it; look what it's done so far!  
What's so amazing that keeps us stargazing, and what do we think we might see?  
Someday we'll find it, the Rainbow Connection, the lovers, the dreamers, and me._


End file.
